"The Alien is My Brother"

The Osservatore Romano headline is typically humane.  We all know that, pace Tom Tancredo, the Vatican encourages love and support for aliens, whether legal or illegal.

In this case, however, they are talking about space aliens.  Klingons, Romulans, and like that.

The Vatican's chief astronomer, Fr. Gabriel Funes, writes that God may well have created intelligent life on other planets.  It's a bit of showmanship, meant to attract media attention (you're welcome), because the Vatican is launching a religion-and-science initiative, including a 2009 conference to mark the bicentennial of Darwin's birth.  Apparently they've gotten over the whole Galileo thing.

Frankly, we're just impressed that they have a Chief Astronomer.  The Lutheran chief astronomer was Tycho Brahe.  He's been dead for 406 years. 

Good Science Is Good Religion

Everybody knows that Copernicus figured out that the earth moves around the sun, that Galieo proved him right by looking through a telescope, and that the Roman Catholic Church tried to shut Galileo down because it believed, for theological reasons, that Copernicus could not be correct.

Right?  Isn't that what everybody knows?

Probably, more or less -- but if so, this is one more instance in which what everybody "knows" is not true.

An article in the current Scientific American* neatly summarizes a much more complex story.  In fact, as Dennis Danielson and Christopher Graney show, the ideas that Copernicus proposed in his 1543 De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium -- although eventually proven to be true -- did not fit with the best experimental evidence available to the scientific community of his time.

In addition to the problem of how something as large as the Earth could move, a matter that would not be fully explicable before Newton's Laws of Motion, would-be Copernicans were troubled by the absence of a measurable annual stellar parallax, which suggested that the diameter of Earth's still-hypothetical orbit around the sun was, when compared to  its distance from the stars, far smaller than previously believed.  There was also serious question about the size of the stars in a Copernican system, since their (apparently, but not really) fixed width would make them vastly larger than anbody had reason to imagine.

The heliocentric model of Copernicus was directly challenged by another brilliant and heavily-funded astronomer, Tycho Brahe.  Tycho proposed a"geoheliocentric" model, in which the sun, moon and stars orbit an immobile earth, while the planets circle the sun.  He attempted to reconcile the elegance of Copernicus' calculations with the other evidence, such as it was.

Galileo's subsequent observations, such as the existence of Jupiter's moons, disproved the Ptolemaic cosmology -- but were compatible with Brahe's system.  In other words, Galileo's oservations "were not  .. understood [by contemporary astronomers] as  proof that Earth revolves around the sun."

The upshot is that it took roughly 200 years for the question of heliocentrism to be settled among scientists.  In addition to Kepler and Newton, the contributions of Gaspard-Gustave de Coriolis were required.  It was not until 1838 that Friedrich Bessel measured the annual stellar parallax and George Airy "produced the first full theoretical explanation for why stars appear to be wider than they are."  So, although by the late 17th century a growing majority of scientists accepted the Copernican model, they did so, as Danielson and Graney observe, "in the face of scientific difficulties."

Danielson and Graney are interested in the large historical question of how the scientific community is,  often and rightly, reluctant to embrace radically new ideas before a significant body of observational data can be adduced to support them:

Back in [Galileo's day], those opposed to Copernicanism had some quite respectable, coherent, observationally based science on their side.  They were eventually proved wrong, but that did not make them bad scientists.  In fact, rigorously disproving the strong arguments of other was part of the challenge, as well as part of the fun, of doing science.

True, by all means.  We at the Egg have another thread to pick at in this story, though, which is the oft-misrepresented role of religion in the history of cosmology.

We have often observed that, despite the weird mythologies of Fundamentalism and Dawkinsism alike, historic Christianity has never been profoundly hostile to the natural sciences.  More often than not, the Church has been deeply and seriously engaged in reading "the book of nature," seeing in it a revelation of God's will that is comparable in majesty to, if different in kind from, the revelation offered in the Bible.  Especially in the Renaissance, the Church was an active and generous patron of science.  Galileo himself worked for the pope, and popes up to the present day have continued to employ court astronomers.

So it is no surprise that, as the models of celestial motion were debated in the 16th and 17th centuries, churchmen would take an interest in the discussion.  And this is where Danielson and Graney observe an interesting irony:

Rather than give up their theory in the face of seemingly incontrovertible evidence, Copernicans were forced to appeal to divine omnipotence.

They cite a Copernican named Christoph Rothmann, writing to Brahe, and arguing that in fact stellar distances could be as large as the Copernicans estimated on the grounds that God was a great king who deserved a great palace.

(Side note:  Rothmann eventually visited Denmark, studied the stars and argued cosmology with Brahe, then disappeared to his hometown to publish some now-lost theological treatises.  [He had studied theology at Wittenberg.] Brahe's famous assistant, Johannes Kepler, seems to have viewed astronomy as a largely religious undertaking.  Clearly, Newton was not the only early astronomer to be an amateur theologian.  Sadly, we know that Newton was a crackpot, and are inclined to suspect the same of Rothmann and Kepler.  Perhaps not incidentally, they were all Protestants.)

In response to the Copernicans, it was Giovanni Battista Riccioli -- both an astronomer and a Jesuit priest -- who argued, in effect, that God should be left out of the cosmological question:  "Even if this falsehood [i.e., the claim that the stars were far away to satisfy God's dignity] cannot be refuted, it cannot satisfy the more prudent men."  Again, he was defending the wrong model -- but please note this representative of a zealous religious order, and younger contemporary of Galileo, attempting to ague that scientific questions should not be resolved by an appeal to theology.

Our point here, and it is one that can never be made too often by and among people with a commitment to traditional Christianity, is that the Church is not and never has been opposed to good science, because good science -- like good religion -- is an honest inquiry into the nature of reality.  No matter what anybody tells you, there is no war between science and religion, at least from the perspective of religion.  And while the story of Galileo is very complicated, taking place in the midst of tumultuous century, it is not fair to say that the Roman Catholic Church, much less all of Christianity, and far less "religion" in the abstract, is its villain.

_______________________________
*Dennis Danielson and Christopher M.Graney, "The Case Aginst Copernicus," in Scientific American, Jan. 2014, 72-77.  The web version is behind a paywall at this writing.

More Data Points, ET Edition

Last post, we connected some dots in the world of religion. But how about the world of an imminent extraterrestrial invasion?

Consider, if you will, these recent developments:

• Last week, the Times of London wrote about the United Nations' first Ambassador to Extraterrestrials. Oh, the UN denies it. They say she watches the skies ... for asteroids. Right.
• This week, group of retired Air Force personnel spoke to the National Press Club with remarkable frankness about UFO sightings in the 1960s. Apparently, the flying saucers kept buzzing our nukes.
• The Keck Observatory and astronomer Steve Vogt have discovered the first Earth-like planet outside our solar system. It's called Gliese581g, and given the vastness of space, they found it pretty darn quickly, huh? Almost as if they had been ... told where to look.

Hmm. Add it all up, and what do you have?

Now, we're not saying that the secret One World Government, having known about the existence of alien visitors to Earth for decades, has recently been told that these visitors are ready to reveal themselves publicly. We're not saying that, because it would be crazy. But if, let's say, Zork of the Interstellar Abyss had recently sent Ban Kee Moon a memo to that effect, what would Ban have done? Obviously, begged for a few weeks to get Earthlings ready for the greatest shock in human history.

And we're not saying that the OWG (or Trilateral Commission, or Knights Templar, or Skull and Bones) has started a slow release of "new" facts to the media, slowly preparing us to reconsider the very the claims it has spent half a century discrediting. That would make us sound like the sort of paranoid crackpot who holes up for days on end in a cramped basement, talking to himself and running off mimeographed newsletters that he sends to PO boxes without names attached. (Which, come to think of it, is exactly what blogging amounts to).

Nope. We're not saying that. All we're saying is what a wise newscaster has already said:

"I, for one, welcome our new alien overlords."

"Quantum Flapdoodle"

The phrase comes from physicist Murray Gell-Mann. It is used by psychologist and professional skeptic Michael Shermer to describe Deepak Chopra's abuse of quantum physics as an argument for the existence of God.

We don't know much about Chopra. We have always figured him for the guest-on-Oprah type, Dr. Phil or Marianne Williamson with a veneer of Eastern exoticism. We knew that he was a physician, and that a little bit of science worked its way into his schtick, but we didn't know quite how far he went. Nor do we now, apart from Schermer.

But if Shermer is to be believed, Chopra is one of those people who read The Tao of Physics as a youth, and took it a little too seriously. That is, he does not merely use the natural world as a metaphor for God, but as a guide to God's actual being. God acts in strange ways; so do subatomic particles; ergo -- goes this line of reasoning -- elementary particles reveal God to us.

This confusion of Creator and creation is an old error, and an easy one to commit, but theologically dangerous. It is one thing to say, as we ourselves did in a sermon once, that the Deus absconditus is like dark energy, vast and unknown. It is quite another to say that dark energy is God. That's a crass confusion of spititual and phyisical realities, a bit like the medieval notion that Purgatory was an identifiable geographic place, to which access could be gained by entering certain caverns. (The picture is just that, from the Hours of the Duc de Berry).

The reference to Purgatory touches on Shermer's point, which is that Chopra uses the language of physics to replace the language of medieval Christian theology, while describing a God who is to all intents and purposes the God of the Scholastics. Shermer calls this "God 2.o,"and even has a handy chart:

God 1.0	God 2.0
omnipresent fully man/fully God miracle leap of faith transubstantiation Council of Rome supernatural forces heaven hell eternity prayer the Godhead the Trinity forgiveness of sin virgin birth resurrection	non-local wave/particle duality wave-function collapse quantum leap Heisenberg uncertainty principle Copenhagen interpretation anti-matter dark energy dark matter space/time continuum quantum entanglement general relativity special relativity quantum erasure quantum decoherence virtual reality

We note the presence of the virgin birth but the absence of the Incarnation and atonement, which reminds us of one weakness of this sort of thinking: physics has no language for sin or forgiveness. Without these, the rest of theology is pretty much crap.

Now, the study of the natural world does indeed have a place in theological studies, and a larger one than Protestantism has usually given it. This was clear to the medieval Church, which designed some of its churches as solar observatories, to more precisely date Easter. It was far more clear to the Church during the Renaissance. People often complain that Galileo was put on trial; they usually forget that he was working for the Pope at the time. In fact, the Pope still employs an astronomer, a Jesuit who is an expert on the mathematics of alternate universes (as the joke goes, in case they need to be evangelized).

But the flapdoodle approach, while useful for wowing people who toggle between Oprah and the Discovery Channel, won't hold up to any serious examination, either by theologians or by physicists.

The Incredible Shrinking Dark Ages

Nothing in my many years of reading about the Middle Ages had led me to suspect that the pope in the year 1000 was the leading mathematician and astronomer of his day.

Nor was his science just a sidelight. According to a chronicler who knew him, he rose from humble beginnings to the highest office in the Christian Church “on account of his scientific knowledge.”

To my mind, scientific knowledge and medieval Christianity had nothing in common. I was wrong.

This is from a fascinating Religion Dispatches interview with Nancy Marie Brown, author of The Abacus and the Cross, a biography of Gerbert d'Aurillac (c. 946-1003), who reigned as Pope Sylvester II.

As regular readers know, we at the Egg are fascinated and impressed by the importance which traditional Christianity attaches to the systematic study of the natural world -- in other words, to science. You know: churches as solar observatories, Galileo on the pope's payroll, that sort of stuff. As we have often pointed out, the existence of the Vatican Observatory is an anomaly only to those who don't really get what Christianity was about before the rise of Fundamentalism.

Brown is a science writer with an interest in the Middle Ages, and even she was surprised by the extent of Sylvester's scientific interest. A Frenchman sent for advanced training in Barecelona, and therefore exposed to the wonders of Islamic science, he

... was the first Christian known to teach math using the nine Arabic numerals and zero. He devised an abacus, or counting board, that mimics the algorithms we use today for adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing. ...

Like a modern scientist, Gerbert questioned authority. He experimented. To learn which of two rules best calculated the area of an equilateral triangle, he cut out square inches of parchment and measured the triangle with them. To learn why organ pipes do not behave acoustically like strings, he built models and devised an equation. ...

Gerbert made sighting tubes to observe the stars and constructed globes on which their positions were recorded relative to lines of celestial longitude and latitude. He (or more likely his best student) wrote a book on the astrolabe, an instrument for telling time and making measurements by the sun or stars. You could even use it to calculate the circumference of the earth, which Gerbert and his peers knew very well was not flat like a disc but round as an apple.

Sylvester sounds remarkable, and Brown's enthusiasm for him seeps through the interview. Even if you plan to buy the book tomorrow, though, read the interview, if only for her fascinating description of what it takes to look at a rare manuscript in a French library.

Here, though, is what all this has us thinking about: the "Dark Ages."

Anybody who reads history knows that this term is unpopular and misleading. (Regine Pernoud's book on on why this is so, published in 1977, remains in print and is especially popular with religious conservatives.) But the term lingers in the popular imagination, and not without some cause. After the eclipse of Roman power, the societies of Western Europe certainly did have a rough time of it compared to, say, Byzantium and the Caliphate. For beautifully-imagined description of how this may have felt, read Iain Pears's Dream of Scipio.

When Fr. Anonymous was a boy, his sixth-grade textbook still spoke of the entire period between about A.D. 500 and 1400 as the Dark Ages, teaching us tots that all was ignorance and barbarism until the Renaissance. We quickly learned that this was nonsense; history is full of little "renaissances," like those of Charlemagne and especially of the 12th Century. For a long time now, we have seen historiography divide the period into "Low" and "High" Middle Ages, with the pretty clear implication that the "High" Middle Ages -- basically, starting in the 11th century -- were the period of the glorious Gothic churches, the advent of Aristotle upon the Christian world, and polyphony. In contrast, the "Low" Middle Ages were, umm, still pretty dark.

Sylvester's story confuses the picture a good deal. Consider this:

Pope Sergius IV, who had been Gerbert’s papal librarian, wrote his epitaph [posted at St. John Lateran]. It reads, in part: “The emperor, Otto III, to whom he was always faithful and devoted, loved him greatly and offered him this church of Rome. They illuminated their time, emperor and pope, by the brilliance of their wisdom. The century rejoiced.” Upon Gerbert’s death, Sergius said, “the world was darkened and peace disappeared.”

How prophetic those words, written in 1009, now sound. Less than a hundred years later, a pope would launch the first Crusade, and The Scientist Pope would be branded a sorcerer and devil-worshipper for having taught the science that had come into Christian Europe from Islamic Spain.

"The world was darkened." That says a lot, dunnit? One of the great scientists of the tenth century was branded as a sorcerer in the 11th -- and, by the way, the brand stuck; only recently has Sylvester's reputation begun to recover.

In the same way, we have sometimes observed, the Renaissance gets a free pass. Witch-hunting, for example, was not (as some people still imagine) a product of the early medieval era; it began slowly in the 1300s and reached its fever pitch during the 16th and 17th centuries. That is to say, during the Reformation, and among Protestants as much as Papists.

So when were the really dark ages? We suppose it depends upon definition. But the era of the Crusades, especially the period from 1202 forward, look pretty damn dark. So, much as we hate to admit it, the Reformation -- at least when considered as a run-up to the Thirty Years' War. For that matter, the brutalities of the colonial period, which began in the Renaissance and continued until 1960, are dark as a dungeon. Nor do Nazism, Sovietism and the two World Wars look really bright. And, hey, the endless peril of nuclear and biological terrorism is no day at the beach, either.

So, really, we're living in the Dark Ages right now, aren't we?

Yup. That's what sin gets you, friends. All ages are dark, more or less equally so, because we human beings are what we are. But then, all ages are bright and full of new life, too, because God is what God is.